#alchemisland

[alchemisland]

Encountering another place

Lifelike shapes rose on mauve tails

Light and freightless as a barren babyless

Or a carriage to which Dick Turpin offered bag emptying terms

Smooth surfaces, no nails

Without rivet, marks of making, maker’s marks

These arks, with ne’ry a buffering moment

Start out across promiscuous stars

Through mysterious bores open like a starving’s mouth

Food-promised starlings set out.

In hopes of carving out new straits, new ways

To traverse a soundless maze some ancient race

Or their wiser maker, hath made

Stars that are eggs

Some wire-pregnant soarer laid.

Like nodes lanterning their own arrival

I waited a while and watched them glide guileful

As they eighted upon my rite-baited nightsky 

Pale stones skimmed masterly most across sable oceans

Some stars barded in bard-heart flame

Others pale and artful like fate-making bone

Puzzling glyphs they left which in order to read a lift was needed.

Weak as a reed, weak

Weed-reeking weeks spent in dreamseeking cryosleep.

[alchemisland]

Moonstoner

White stones foam bright. Snow mode.

Flying light. She’s blue dyed, phone light.

Open holes. Low rise. Ozone. Open goals. Slow high.

She peels down. My note rises.

Feels my pealing soul, calms me down. Gown wound of eaten iris.

Ball games. We’re fucking rough as the wall game, Eton type.

Easeful. Peaceful. Painterly. Can’t please me enough type

Can’t get it roughly enough and I love that. Insufferable lust strikes

With the hour’s regularity. What I could do with an hour. What barbarity.

I have no time for whatever overposed rhymes

These other overblown dime Christs are parroting.

Dangerous downward spiral relents, rebounds. The weight I am carrying

She takes. With flame-stabled lancet she scrapes away my carrion;

A decade of harrying, of constant parrying. Now my hair is being braided

My brain is being invaded by waves of feelings of greater safety. Satiety.

Spiralbound notebook redounds to her tortoise love’s alluvial topsoil.

The hero, his foil. In royal hues a month’s toil. Oil boiling fumes. Stop Boy

Becomes Go Boy. Turtle doves hurtling profusely

Towards a purple oven-sun, diffuse as effusive.

Loosening such that made useless my rusted armour; all my harm rumour.

Elucidated by her hallucinatory charm, the jarred snake she makes me;

I was illuminated by her puce moon’s humour. My chains are removed

And just in time because I’ve seen the signs and Ragnarök is due.

No more to thwarted. No more falling on swords. It’s all for you.

Unzipped and all warted. One lick I’m sporting a snooker cue

Again. When we talk it’s like scoring,

Again. What they make of men;

What men make of them and say to them:

Menhirs, pagans, Amon Hen. Amen, again.

Signs to stay here, satyrs, Satan’s henge.

[alchemisland]

The hateful sun’s tongueblistering hymns

To taste the SunSon, I sucked vinegar and blood from the sponge

A cackling Roman forced the wincing Christ to suck for succour.

Older than the bog’s butter the names I must mutter

Dark splutters which muster summonable others.

When She sings, however shrilly, leathery wings begin to flutter

In some divorced and gushing void

In our path, slabs of solar slag like fallen flags, for the sun had shed its skin.

Beloved kinless, on this oven kiln day all men are skinless to a lidless gaze.

[alchemisland]

Centreless

The omphalos naturally is up higher

For a guy blasted legless by shellfire at Marne or Ypres

Any barn’s a cathedral with a high enough steeple, enough quiet people

Realizing I am my brother’s keeper

Another’s esteem can smother; is as steam

Which one can covet but cannot cup nor keep; it does nothing

Save corrupt.

[alchemisland]

My Aristotle

Elocution lessons I came to regret having expressedly taken for pleasure

I tried cutely to lessen their length by feigning faintness

But my unpersuadable tutor accompanied me to my outpatients

In his vocation’s suede, clean shabby in that bachelor way,

Looking like Aunty’s favourite smoke-stained seating arrangements.

From mean habit estranged: lean, stringent, kindly, unfrail.

Something dwelt about him of veldt untamedness,

A wildness that plainness housed

His eyes proved inample casement

To the strength of the deed-pregnant flame

Placed at his brave centre.

[alchemisland]

Flockwatcher

Awake again today. The lark still lies.

Dark the rilles which remark “Still night”.

Lies still while the smart fox disguises what ills his corpse-mind prizes;

Skulks, prones, courts day’s first strokes

Upon his rufous cloak and flanks;

Watched flock moving over bitten salient

With the unassailability of a tank.

[alchemisland]

An examination of force

Long gone the days 

Of legions unafraid 

Chasing Mithridates 

From the city walls 

To the shores of Euphrates.

The scored shield of the gloried legion,

Now a sprouting boundless must have edges found for it.

The pitiless strength must be fitted

With satin gloves more fitting

For making love poetry

Than subduing rebel tribes.

This subjugating subject to which I am subjected

Suffers neither peer lecture nor editorial truncation.

[alchemisland]

Fontchecker

A busy scholar full of time and curious bother 

Happened across my mossy hovel one morrow

Right nasty and gross, rotlogged.

Better works blazed below size eight typefaces

Which only he, fox-graced, could trace.

Great care changing and rearranging

Yet caught despite.